Mobile IP (or IP mobility) is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard communications protocol that is designed to allow mobile device users (or mobile nodes) to move from one network to another while maintaining a permanent IP address. Mobile IPv6 is a version of Mobile IP which enables a mobile node (MN) to maintain its connectivity to a packet data network (e.g., the Internet) during handover—e.g., when moving from one access network to another access network.
As specified in RFC 5268, the Mobile IP Fast Handover protocol aims to reduce handover latency when the mobile node moves all its flows from one source access network to one target access network with the Mobile IP protocol used. Recently, the Mobile IPv6 protocol has been extended to allow a mobile node to bind multiple care-of addresses to one home address, and furthermore, to bind a particular flow to a care-of address. Such extensions allows a mobile node to direct a specific flow to one of its interfaces and exchange flows with a home agent via different access networks simultaneously, since certain flow may be better suited to the characteristics of a certain access network. Furthermore, the PFMIP protocol is proposed to reduce handover latency when a mobile node performs a handover using PMIP.
Such extensions introduce new handover scenarios, for example, a mobile node may handover some flows from one access network to another access network while still keeping other flows on the first access network, by using the same or different mobility protocols. Techniques are disclosed herein for reducing handover latency in such scenarios.